Greg Sanders

What's the logic of Kansas

Kevin Drum has an excellent review of Grand New Party, a book by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam outlining how the GOP could try to better appeal to the working clas. I haven’t read it, and don’t really intend to as while I enjoy the writers I’m not really the target audience here.

That said, they do make some interesting points, notably a counter to Thomas Frank’s argument that the GOP manages to trick lower income voters into going against their economic interest by supporting social conservativism.

If [working class] were as poorly off as they were in the 1930s, abortion and gay rights wouldn’t mean much to them, but as long these voters are comfortable—not rich, maybe, but not too badly off, either—then why not vote for the party that represents their social values?

This is especially true, Douthat and Salam argue, since maintenance of traditional social values has more economic value to the working class than it does to the college-educated middle class. In the well-off suburbs, divorce is rare, crime is low, and kids mostly don’t have children out of wedlock. What’s more, when those things do happen, the better-off classes have the resources to deal with them. To the upper middle class, then, the constellation of issues revolving around the breakdown of the traditional family seems a distant concern...

But as Douthat and Salam point out, doesn’t it make sense that the people who are most often face-to-face with these problems are also the ones who are most concerned about them? Put that way, of course it does. What’s more, things like divorce, single-parent families, and teen pregnancy incur costs that are harder to deal with the poorer you are, so to a large extent, when working class whites vote for socially conservative Republicans they’re also voting their economic self-interest.

I think the trade-off being made is that traditional values restrict the freedom of women in exchange for increasing the economic stability of the family unit. The shared interests model of marriage is really the premium model, if you’re lower on the economic totem pole you might find the old opposite attracts specialization model much more practical. There’s no real economic benefit to oppressing gays, but that is more of a side-cost of the support structure of traditional religion. The trade offs don’t seem advantageous to me, but at least I can see the logic.

On the liberal side, we can probably find ways to address these concerns without resorting to patriarchy. I tend to think we should find a way to subsidize child care in a way that is also appealing to stay at home mothers. That said, we’re not offering a return to the old ways, so we’re just going to lose some of this demographic.

Life is cheap[er] after the Bush years

One thing you have to say for the President, he’s pretty consistent on this score. I’m surprised the price of life only dropped by 1.1 million.

Hellboy 2: Review

Saw it and enjoyed it, but don’t strongly recommend it. Guillermo del Toro continues to have quite a distinctive an imaginative way of presenting fantasy worlds. Both for better and for worse each magical entity seems fairly unique. This isn’t to say that there’s no duplication, just that with a few prominent exceptions even two creatures of the same general species tend to look completely different. On the upside, this means one wondrous visual after another, on the downside it takes away some of the pleasure of pattern recognition and figuring out the rules.

The action was terrific and speaks for itself. However, the plotting was a bit by the numbers with character choices often seeming driven by the dictates of the story and the themes rather than any consistent internal motivation. That was far less of a problem in Pan’s Labyrinth, a del Toro film I loved, with the exception of when Ophelia’s breaking a key and well known fairy tale rule for insufficiently established reasons.

Wall-E discussion (Spoilers): Part 1, the big controversy.

Enjoyed it. There’s reviews everywhere so I’m skipping straight on to spoilers. Here’s a pretty pictures to let those of you who haven’t seen it yet bail.

Planning to do a few posts, I’ll start over at Slate Daniel Engber criticizes the film’s depiction of a chronically obese humanity:

According to this lazy logic, a fat body stands in for a distended culture: We gain weight and the Earth suffers. If only society could get off its big, fat ass and go on a diet!

But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar myths about the overweight: They’re weak-willed, indolent, and stupid.

Amanda Marcotte offers an alternative explanation that the fat is really a stand in for an infantalized population.

What I didn’t expect, and what floored me was that they were basically overgrown babies, fat with short arms and no bone density or ability to walk... *Yes, I realize that this has all sorts of weird implications in a culture where fat people are subject to all sorts of unfair stereotypes. But once the choice was made to represent grown adults as overgrown babies---which is the best choice for how the movie plays out---I’m not sure how you get around that problem.

I think Marcotte nails the filmmakers intention exactly. That said, intentions don’t automatically translate into success. While the movie ignores any genetic ties to obesity it also doesn’t blame the individual, the cause is entirely environmental.

(Think about how Americans are slave to our cars, for instance.) I think making the people of the future near-literal babies (with lots of comparison shots to actual babies to drive home the message) was a brave choice, and made the movie work much better than the alternatives would have. It makes humanity much more sympathetic, because people aren’t wicked, just living these half-lives of utter dependence on robots. Their computer screens are Plato’s cave, but they do embrace the opportunity to move outside the cave when it’s given.

I wonder if the Plato’s cave analogy was intentional, it does seem really spot on. In any event I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. I can see why it really bothered one overweight person [to the point of] crying. On the other hand, 100% of the humans in the film were fat and really it took only the slightest bit of jarring to get them to begin to break from their infantile state. So on the whole, I’m with the film on this one. I think the best way to have better handled this would be to get sophisticated on how exactly modern society and technology influence us. More on that in a future post.

Our President is a Supervillain

And a badly written one at that:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

From the London Daily Telegraph via Spencer Ackerman,

Wedding Planning Foobs

The Comics Curmudgeon had roughly the same response to today’s For Better of For Worse that I did. I’ll skip the summary and just recommend you click through.

Happily this is an issue on which I have some credibility, as I’ve put in my hours on wedding planning. I’m actually reasonably sympathetic to Liz here, hers is being pushed up because of a relative on the edge of death, that’s not really something you can plan for. She’s stressed, but I would be to in that situation particularly if I wasn’t getting any help.

I do wonder to what extent the Patterson men in For Better or For Worse are supposed to be somewhat unlikable because they never help around the house (even though one is a stay at home writer) or just act bratty. The flashback strips further reinforce this phenomenon with Michael doing his best Dennis the Menace impersonation. I think it actually is increasingly intentional, but I’m not sure where Lynn Johnson is going with it just yet.

The War Powers act that doesn't do anything

So there’s a new proposal on how to revamp the War Powers act, which gives Congress a mechanism to force withdrawals under certain condition but that is a mechanism that Congress has never used. In any event a proposal to fix it seems fairly worthless as enforcing the act would require overcoming a veto. If you can overcome a veto you already can basically do what you want, why do you need a war powers act?

Timothy Noah also picked up on this and provides some explanation as to why this whole area is so messed up: Congress doesn’t want that responsibility. He cites a historical example.

What amazed and shocked me, and moved me to write up the debate for the New Republic, was the unembarrassed manner in which members of Congress declared as their paramount interest the absence of any legislative fingerprints on whatever might result from allowing (or not allowing) the Navy convoys to enter an area of violent conflict. In fact, it was pretty much taken as a given that the War Powers Resolution would not be invoked, not because the president was not complying with it (no president ever has) but because doing so would require Congress to either approve or revoke Reagan’s decision.

If he’s right, we’ve got a structural flaw in the Constitution. We need a Congress willing to actually exercise or deny the ability to declare war. Absent that, we need an alternate check to ensure accountability for one of the executive branches most dangerous powers. The only alternative I’m coming up with is a no confidence vote as an alternate means to impeachment of removing a president.

More on Iraqi government calls for withdrawal

Both Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman note that Iraq’s national-security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, is echoing Maliki’s statement on withdrawal.

"There should not be any permanent bases in Iraq unless these bases are under Iraqi control," Rubaie said. "We would not accept any memorandum of understanding with [the U.S.] side that has no obvious and specific dates for the foreign troops’ withdrawal from Iraq."

That quote is from the a Post article by Ernesto Londono and Dan Eggen, and Ackerman adds that al-Rubaie has been national-security advisor under the past three premiers. Wacky. Anyways, in addition to other Arab governments and the Iraqi people, according to some perhaps sketchy sources serious pressure is apparently now coming from the top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Sadr is a top rival to Sistani, even to the extent of allegedly having some of the Grand Ayatollah’s people killed, but they seem to come down on the same side on this one.

I rather doubt the Bush administration would sign on for an agreement that had firm withdrawal conditions. Instead they’d probably try to renew the U.N. authority. That’s actually a perfectly reasonable option as it will leave the decision in the hands of the next administration,possibly one more willing to consult Congress. Alternately, Kevin Drum notes that they may just have an easily fudge-able set of withdrawal guidelines. That’ll depend on whether this timeline talk is genuine or merely a response to outside pressure to be slipped out of at the first opportunity.

Horror in Zimbabwe

The latest new, from the LA Times via Yglesias, show the situation further degrading. I’ve got a Washington Post article to read for some more background on Mugabe’s base of support.

It seems the ZANU-PF have set up a series of camps around Zimbabwe that "provide a base from which to burn houses, displace people and beat, maim or kill opposition activists" on which, in addition, large numbers of women are being held captive as slaves and frequently raped.

The hopeful side of the LA Times’s very bleak account is the suggestion that the government may actually be running out of the necessary cash to keep all its goon squads in operation. Still, even if something happens to force Mugabe from power, one has to think that a lot of these folks in his militias aren’t necessarily going to give up their own appetite for robbery, rape, mayhem, etc. no matter what happens at the top.

I think there’s going to need to be an African Union force to help return Zimbabwe to normalcy after Mugabe is gone. The International Criminal Court should probably launch investigations, particularly ones that target key military and militia leaders, the type politicians may be more willing to throw to the wolves. Indicting Mugabe makes sense as well, but probably any deal to get him out of power will mean he gets sanctuary somewhere.

Anyways, the situation is developing, and unfortunately it seems to be developing much faster than the African Union’s response.

Iraqi government interested in a withdrawal timetable

I’ve been neglecting Iraq a bit because I keep meaning to make a comprehensive post but don’t end up doing any shorter easier ones. That seems silly so I’m jumping back in the game. Iraq is definitely looking better than this time a year ago, the Sunni awakening, the ceasefire with Sadr, the increase in the number of troops, and the adoption of more counter insurgency tactics all made a difference.

I think the most interesting story of the past few months has been of Primen Minister Maliki finding ways to consolidate power. I was initially skeptical, particularly when he needed the U.S. to bail him out of his attack on Sadr’s militia’s. However, the Iranian negotiated settlement of that conflict seems to have reduced the profile of Sadr’s people without resulting in a renewal of conflict. The provincial elections will be an important test of strength and popularity, but for the moment it appears Maliki has managed to co-opt or sideline some of his key Shia rivals.

Not surprisingly, at the same time the Iraqi government is getting tougher in negotiations with the U.S. on a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Ilan Goldberg has analysis over at Democracy Arsenal:

First of all, this is no surprise. The entire controversy over the SOFA from the Iraqi perspective was that the Iraqis wouldn’t sign onto any long-term agreement if it didn’t include a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces. The political uproar in Iraq for an American withdrawal is simply too great. So this makes absolute sense. The key question now is whether or not the Bush Administration agrees. If they do, we might get a reasonable agreement. If they don’t, they’ll probably end up with a temporary renewal of the UN Security Council Resolution and the next President can negotiate this agreement.

The third alternative, the one many people expected, was that the U.S. would use carrots and sticks to get the government of a country we occupy to go along with the rules we wanted. That’s often how things work out, governments in occupied states tend to be highly reliant on the occupier. Instead, democracy might just help us get out of Iraq. If Maliki provides too many compromises he won’t be able to get the Iraqi Parliament to pass the SOFA or will be vulnerable to a electoral (or insurgent) challenge by his Shia rivals (possibly in coalition with Sunnis that want the U.S. to leave). Thus he’s got a strong incentive to stand up to the U.S. Since a President Obama is also interested in the U.S. leaving Iraq, post-2009 this could be a relatively easy negotiation.